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4 Responses

The most common cause of duplicate content is multiple versions of a URL point to the same content.

mysite.com/blog

mysite.com/blog/

www.mysite.com/blog

Each of the above examples, along with many others, can all point to the exact same page. The issue can be resolved by adding a canonical tag to your page's html. In the <head> tag of your html add <link rel="canonical" href="http://mysite.com/blog" />

Replace the URL in the example with the URL of your page. Once that is done, run a new crawl report. If you continue to find duplicate content, take a look at the exact URLs and referring pages to help narrow down the issue.

My view on tags is that they are helpful for humans to find information on a specific topic quickly. Being that they are more beneficial to human visitors than search engines, I have always blocked tag pages from being indexed via robots.txt. I also block categories and feeds from being crawled as well. This may be overkill, but it has worked well for me to avoid duplicate content issues on various blogs that I help manage.

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